The present invention relates to access of information over a wide area network such as the Internet. More particularly, the present invention relates to web enabled recognition allowing information and control on a client side to be entered using a variety of methods.
Small computing devices such as personal information managers (PIM), devices and portable phones are used with ever increasing frequency by people in their day-to-day activities. With the increase in processing power now available for microprocessors used to run these devices, the functionality of these devices are increasing, and in some cases, merging. For instance, many portable phones now can be used to access and browse the Internet as well as can be used to store personal information such as addresses, phone numbers and the like.
In view that these computing devices are being used for browsing the Internet, or are used in other server/client architectures, it is therefore necessary to enter information into the computing device. Unfortunately, due to the desire to keep these devices as small as possible in order that they are easily carried, conventional keyboards having all the letters of the alphabet as isolated buttons are usually not possible due to the limited surface area available on the housings of the computing devices.
Recently, voice portals such as through the use of VoiceXML (voice extensible markup language) have been advanced to allow Internet content to be accessed using only a telephone. In this architecture, a document server (for example, a web server) processes requests from a client through a VoiceXML interpreter. The web server can produce VoiceXML documents in reply, which are processed by the VoiceXML interpreter and rendered audibly to the user. Using voice commands through voice recognition, the user can navigate the web.
VoiceXML is a markup language with flow control tags; however, flow control does not follow the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) flow control model, which includes eventing and separate scripts. Rather, VoiceXML generally includes a form interpretation algorithm that is particularly suited for telephone-based voice-only interaction, and commonly, where the information obtained from the user is under the control of the system or application. Incorporation of VoiceXML directly into applications available in a client-server relationship where graphically user interfaces are also provided will require the developer to master two forms of web authoring, one for VoiceXML and the other using HTML (or the like), each one following a different flow control model.
There is thus an ongoing need to improve upon the architecture, or parts thereof, and methods used to provide speech recognition in a server/client architecture such as the Internet. The authoring tool for speech recognition should be easily adaptable to small computing devices such as PIMs, telephones and the like. An architecture or method of web authoring that addresses one, several or all of the foregoing disadvantages is particularly needed. An architecture that allows other methods of input would also be beneficial.